AMerigo vespucci, AMERICA IS NAMED IN HIS HONOUR...

Explorer and navigator Amerigo Vespucci was born March 9, 1451 in Florence, Italy. On May 10, 1497 he embarked on his first voyage. On his third and most successful voyage, he discovered present-day Rio de Janeiro and Rio de la Plata. Believing he had discovered a new continent, he called South America the New World. In 1507, America was named after him. He died of malaria in Seville, Spain on February 22, 1512.

Vespucci and his parents, Ser Nastagio and Lisabetta Mini, were friends of the wealthy and tempestuous Medici family, who ruled Italy from the 1400s to 1737. Vespucci's father worked as a notary in Florence. While his older brothers headed off to the University of Pisa in Tuscany, Vespucci received his early education at the hands of his paternal uncle, a Dominican friar named Giorgio Antonio Vespucci.

In 1507, some scholars at St-Die were working on a geography book called Cosmographae introduction, which contained large cut-out maps that the reader could use to create his or her own globes. German cartographer Martin Waldseemuler, one of the book's writers, proposed that the newly discovered Brazilian portion of the New World be labeled America, the feminine version of the name Amerigo, after Amerigo Vespucci. The gesture was his means of honoring the person who discovered it, and indeed granted Vespucci the legacy of being America's namesake.

Decades later, in 1538, the mapmaker Mercator, working of the maps created at St-Die, chose to mark the name America on both the northern and southern parts of the continent, instead of just the southern portion. While the definition of America expanded to include more territory Vespucci seemed to gain credit for areas that most would agree were actually first discovered by Christopher Columbus.